Volvos these days can automatically brake to prevent rear-end collisions and recognize and respond to humans walking across their paths. Now the company wants to extend the functionality of the latter system to recognize animals. Volvo engineers have to “teach” the system to detect and distinguish between different animals, with the initial focus being on nighttime functionality and recognizing larger species such as moose, deer, and reindeer, which pose a greater risk to a car’s occupants.

While a collision with a large animal is no laughing matter, we do find some of Volvo’s development methods amusing. For one data-logging mission, Volvo engineers drove slowly along a path that had been covered in food to attract deer and moose in order to record film sequences of the animals’ behaviors. The recordings will help Volvo program the system to detect the movements of various animals, but we can’t help but chuckle at the thought of slow-moving Volvos filled with engineers going all Discovery Channel cameraman on unsuspecting woodland creatures. Volvo wants to have the system production-ready within a few years, and hopes it will help reduce the more than 40,000 incidents involving animals every year in Sweden alone.